YOU’VE read this before about any number of new restaurants, but here goes:

La Fonda del Sol could be the place that finally popularizes modern Spanish cuisine in New York. The food’s mostly grand and has steadily improved since the opening last winter. And it’s happily perched inside the MetLife Building with a bright entrance on commuter-artery Vanderbilt Avenue — a location that guarantees people will at least try it, a big step in Spanish-averse New York.

La Fonda del Sol, under executive chef Josh DeChellis, is really two venues in one — a casual, noisy front room for tapas only (most $8 to $11) and a carpeted, steakhouse-like dining room up a few steps for larger offerings (starters $12 to $18, main dishes mostly in the $20s). Ignore reviews that favored the cheap seats and go with the plusher upstairs; they’ll cheerfully serve you items off the tapas menu on request.

The eatery from Patina Restaurant Group bears the name of a famous place of the 1960s and early ’70s created by legendary Joe Baum. But this Fonda del Sol has zero in common with its long-gone predecessor in the Time-Life Building, and anyone expecting a second coming of the flamboyant, touristically Latin original might be baffled.

Spain is blessed with some of the world’s best seafood, pork, cheese, bread, olives, beans and mushrooms. Its greatest chefs have eclipsed France’s in the global cutting-edge pantheon.

Yet “Spanish cuisine” is a turnoff to those who associate it either with monotonous old-school cooking — paella Valenciana, anyone? — or the far-out, “molecular” style of Ferran Adrià and his disciples.

Too many diners are unaware of the great middle ground that flourishes in the Basque country, Catalonia and Madrid, where chefs wed pan-Mediterranean raw materials and rigorous technique in myriad creative ways.

Spanish-inspired tastes have established a foothold here at tapas parlors like Boqueria and Tia Pol. But attempts to introduce them on a grander scale routinely flop — at Meigas in SoHo, at Pazo on East 57th Street and at Barca 18 in Flatiron, a collaboration by Stephen Hanson and Eric Ripert.

Barca 18 was particularly frustrating. If a good Spanish restaurant run by Hanson and Ripert couldn’t make it, what hope is there for a chain-owned place near Grand Central Terminal?

Quite a lot, in fact. DeChellis, whose best previous Manhattan gig was at Japanese-inspired Sumile, has lived and worked in Spain — including at Arzak in San Sebastian, one of Europe’s greatest restaurants. His approach at La Fonda del Sol is not to clobber us with “concept,” however, but to gently ease diners into a cuisine that’s shunned by too many who routinely pig out on French, Italian and Japanese mutations.

Oodles of dishes persuasively convey the spirit, if not precisely the composition, of modern restaurants in Madrid and Barcelona. DeChellis can’t be too forward — this is the MetLife Building, after all. But a few curious clinkers like tough pork belly with limp crackling are outnumbered by the likes of mouth-melting cod a la plancha attended by smoked potato, salt cod and clam juice, and supernally tender braised pork cheeks with judiones beans and sausage.

Tapas include some warhorse items, but many more original treats like yummy pulled pork sliders brought to piquant life by smoked dates and pickled fennel. They look dainty enough to remind you of White Castle burgers. “Well, I did grow up in New Jersey,” DeChellis laughs.

Most compelling of all was a dish that’s not on the menu, but presented as a complimentary amuse-bouche. Tiny Taylor Bay scallops shared shells with a pool of tomato water seasoned with saffron and lemon and sparked with horseradish. “The chef recommends you down it all at once,” the waitress said.

A single slurp delivers a starburst of oceanic essence, fruit and fire. Please, Mr. DeChellis, put it on the menu and charge as much as you want.